Everyone’s talking about the travesty that is Trumpty Numpty ordering a $54 steak well-done and covering it in ketchup. And sure, that sounds obnoxious, but Kate Harding on Facebook posted a photo of a guy holding up a sign at a protest rally: “HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A DOG.”

I mean…that tells you so much more about the SCROTUS’s character than how he eats a steak. Even Nixon had a dog! I have this headcanon where Trumpty Numpty is so gross, even my brother’s dog wouldn’t get close enough to accept a treat from him. He and Melania once got a little pooch for Barron, and that dog was Barron’s best friend whenever his dad was away, but it turned into a little killing machine whenever The Donald showed up, so they had to give it back. Cats are just as bad; they constantly try to escape the penthouse, and they’d rather fall off the top of Trump Tower than stay one more minute in that man’s presence. Cats love Melania (although I don’t let her off the hook), and dogs love Barron, but all companion animals flee at the sight of Commander-in-Cheeto.

First: do not do anything that will make the DC Metro system run any worse than it does already. If I cannot use the Metro, then I will have no choice but to find a new job closer to home, and if I no longer have to spend 2.5 hours per day in transit between work and home, I will have more time to get together with the other lefty pinkos around here and figure out how to fuck shit up. I live in Greenbelt; you can’t throw a rock around here without hitting a weirdo. Don’t give us more time to collude and collaborate. You have plenty of opponents already living in the District, and when we suburbanites want to get downtown for protests, we’ll find ways to get there. Might as well be on the Metro.

Second: do not fuck with our Internet access. You wanna censor the information we can access? Whatever, I’ll find it anyway, but if we cannot use high-speed wifi at home, then we cannot stream TV shows, and if we cannot watch the new season of Game of Thrones next summer, that’s ten weeks we’ll spend fucking shit up.

Third: do not fuck with my electricity. If I can’t use mass transit, that’s bad enough, but I can still entertain myself at home. If I can’t access the Internet, that’s even worse, but I’ll still find things to do. If I cannot charge my laptop, then I’ll have no choice but to go outside and fuck shit up. I live within spitting distance of USDA property, I’m good with animals, and you’d be surprised at how far I can walk. If I were y’all, I’d be legalizing weed and handing out free Netflix accounts like candy at a parade.

If I were in DJ Rump’s position, I wouldn’t be calling attention to the legality of an election that I, ultimately, won.

Especially if there were lots of people already suggesting there was some funny business involving the Russian government involved in some of the battleground states where I won.

I get that he’s sore about losing the popular vote by literally millions, but he still won the Presidency, Seven help us all.

But, sure, President Pussygrabber, go on and put even more scrutiny on the election that put you in the White House! Let’s see what other fun and colorful things we learn about the validity of your victory. Here’s some rope. The gallows are other there.

Yeah, no. People who voted for Trump are, by definition, not our allies. I’ll be open to dialogue with any Trump voters who admit their mistake within the next four years. But they are not the priority. My priority is the well-being of the people who get screwed over by the actions of the Trump administration. It’s not on us to “reach out” to people who decided we should eat toxic waste for dinner. Susan Sarandon, and everyone else who discouraged people from voting for Hillary, are not entitled to an opinion in this matter.

Rebecca Solnit at the Guardian says exactly what’s been on my mind since the election: the problem is not that Hillary Clinton wasn’t a good enough candidate. She was not a sub-par candidate who had the Democratic primaries rigged in her favor. (I can’t believe this is actually a thing I’m hearing from otherwise reasonable people.) She was an outstanding candidate and the climate surrounding the general election was unfairly stacked against her in tactics going back decades. Rebecca explains:

You can flip that and see that Trump was such a weak candidate it took decades of scheming and an extraordinary international roster of powerful players to lay the groundwork that made his election possible. Defeating Clinton in the electoral college took the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act by Republican appointees to the supreme court. It took vast Republican voter suppression laws and tactics set in place over many years. It took voter intimidation at many polling places. It took the long Republican campaign to blow up the boring bureaucratic irregularity of Clinton’s use of a private email server into a scandal that the media obediently picked up and reheated.

I DID vote this year. Buuuuuut? It took some effort to convince myself to do so.

If most other young liberals feel the same way I do, that explains much of the low voter turnout, which in turn goes some way to explain many of the left-wing losses. I just…had nothing to get excited about in this election. Even now, I look at my fellow lefties wringing their hands about the election results, and I’m just like, “…meh.”

Like, here in Maryland we have a new Republican governor. Other MD liberals are getting all upset and surprised. I don’t see why they’re surprised. We’re not THAT liberal a state. We’re basically a handful of densely populated, liberal jurisdictions and a whole lot of rural, conservative ones. O’Malley’s predecessor, Bob Ehrlich, was a Repub, and I’m not a fan of the guy, but we survived. Maryland has had Republican governors before, and we’re still here. Of course I’d rather have more like O’Malley and fewer like Ehrlich, but my point is that the Bob Ehrlichs have happened and will continue to happen. Governor-Elect Hogan can thank all the apathetic liberals who couldn’t be bothered to vote this year for his victory.

I asked myself in 2012 whether it was worth the trouble to vote. I figured: my state is going to go for Obama with or without me, so what difference does my vote make? (Non-voters are sort of like anti-vaxxers that way; we depend on other people doing what we don’t want to.) What got me to the polls then was the state ballot initiative Question 6, which legalized same-sex marriage. Every single vote counted for the ballot initiative, so I dragged my ass to the polls, and I was pleased as punch to find out that not only did my state approve marriage equality by popular vote, but my county was among the districts that broke for Yes. Just barely! But that just proves the point! My vote counted.

But this year? There just wasn’t anything going on that really got me excited for the election. I didn’t even see Lt. Gov. Brown’s campaign for Governor of Maryland, and I’m hearing now that he ran a really weak campaign. I’ll have to take their word for it, as whatever campaign he did run didn’t even reach me, and sure enough, he lost. It didn’t get liberals excited enough to drag their asses to the polls.

This year, there was nothing happening that I genuinely cared about. Ultimately, I remembered that the people who vote for the losing side are still counted, and so no matter what happened, my vote would mean something to someone. President Obama is aware of the percentage of the electorate who voted for McCain and Romney, and Gov. Hogan will be aware of the number of Marylanders who voted for Brown. I have no idea how that knowledge will affect his governance, but it’s still important that he knows how many people voted for the other guy. There are people who keep track of how many people voted for what and whom. Those numbers are a matter of public record. The losing side still counts. Always.

The point of this post, though, is that I do understand why some people, sometimes, don’t bother to vote. We need to have something to vote for. The left wing, this year, didn’t show us something worth fighting for.

The Texas Republican argued that the amendment was more about protecting wildlife than minorities and other groups.

“There is nobody in this chamber who is more appreciative than I am for the gentleman from Tennessee and my friend from Michigan standing up for the rights of race, religion, national religion of the Delta Smelt, the snail darter, various lizards, the lesser prairie chicken, the greater sage grouse and so many other insects who would want someone standing for their religion, their race, their national origin and I think that’s wonderful,” Gohmert quipped.

He added that the original Republican bill would actually “protect interests” of minorities because it provided for greater transparency.

“It will not allow for some conservative or radical right-wing administration or group in the fish and wildlife to cut a deal with some right-wing radical group and we never know about it so nobody can intervene and stop it,” Gohmert insisted. “So you don’t have some group that is directly aligned with somebody in the administration at that point coming together, cutting a sweetheart deal between themselves, to the determent of the race, religion and national [origin?] of snail darters and other animals and fish and wildlife.”

But…what? Is your brain scrambled? I don’t even know what exactly the message is you’re trying to get across. Did you forget your meds? It’s not fair to people with cognitive impairments or mental illness to lump Gohmert in with them, but I think a neurological disturbance would go a long way in explaining his speech patterns.

RawStory pointed me to this article regarding Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N. Dakota), and now I want to crawl out of my skin.

While at the most recent state coalition membership meeting held on March 26, 2013, two of North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp’s staff and North Dakota Congressman Kevin Cramer were on the agenda. They were brought in to listen to the Directors of programs throughout North Dakota. We were instructed to voice our concerns, needs, and other issues that are affecting our programs. We had a lot to discuss. The recent passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), including Tribal provisions giving limited jurisdiction over non-Native perpetrators, was a long, hard-fought battle that many are grateful for. The sequester was looming over all of the Directors’ heads. Senator Heitkamp’s staff were great. They listened, took notes, and asked questions. We all expressed our thanks for Senator Heitkamp’s support. Immediately following Heitkamp’s staff was North Dakota Congressman Kevin Cramer. A couple of Program Directors spoke, then I followed. Knowing that Cramer spoke out openly against the constitutionality of the Tribal Provisions in VAWA, I thanked him for his support and proceeded with my concerns including how the Tribal Sexual Assault Services Program (TSASP) was taken out of the CTAS grant solicitation that went out to Tribes. I said that our state, because of the oil boom, has been impacted negatively. I mentioned that the program in Fort Berthold, for example, has seen drastic changes.